As the person behind our billet program, I beg to differ. There are tool marks as with any billet, we just choose to have the part look more like a forging in finished form. There are some steps done during machining and heat treat that alleviate the common billet raw look on our parts.
A boxed strutted Hemi piston is hard to forge reliably due to the fact that the "finger" length of the forge punch would be too long to withstand repeated use in manufacturing. You would be lucky to get five forgings out of one run before the punch broke. We manufacture and supply others piston forgings, besides machining pistons. We are one of two companies that make their own forgings and manufacture pistons under the same roof. Most others companies buy from us or APP. If a forging ocould be made reliably we would have done this already "as forged", rather than a billet. We have customers willing to buy tooling for this project.
